The 9 Circles of Restaurant Employee

Scheduling HellAnd Achieve Labor

Management Salvation

How to Escape

An eBook for Restaurant Operators by

Introduction pg.3 The 9 Circles of Restaurant Employee Scheduling Hell pg.4 Tracking Constant Schedule Changes pg.4 Poor Team Communication pg.5 Juggling Labor Compliance pg.6 Time Theft & Payroll Pains pg.7 Erratic Staff ing Levels pg.8 Low Employee Engagement pg.9 Increased Employee Turnover pg.11 Lack of Visibility into KPIs & Insights pg.13 Dissatisf ied Customers – & Lower Prof its pg.14

Contents

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The Key to Labor Management Salvation pg.15

They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. But when

it comes to the restaurant industry, we here at HotSchedules, Now Powered by Fourth say that road is paved with inefficient scheduling practices — spreadsheets, sticky notes, a deluge of text messages and email requests from demanding employees.

These outdated labor management methods can result in wasted time, chaotic communication, unnecessary labor spend, increased employee turnover and decreased customer satisfaction. We don’t want to get TOO dramatic about it, but it can be a cause of pain and suffering for any restaurant manager. And if these methods go unchecked, they can start to feel like the 9 Circles of Hell.

But never fear — it’s not all doom and gloom! There is a path out of the fiery depths, towards something we like to call Labor Management Salvation (just go with us here, okay?) and it’s paved with tools that provide comprehensive labor management and scheduling automation. Here, you’ll discover proactive ways to engage and empower employees, schedule faster, optimize your labor costs, and much, much more.

In this eBook, we’re going to take a journey through the 9 Circles of Restaurant Employee Scheduling Hell and outline tangible paths to scheduling and labor management salvation. If you’ve ever managed a restaurant, you’ve probably experienced a few of these circles already.

Let’s start the descent.

(It’ll be okay — we promise!)

How to Escape the 9 Circles of Restaurant Employee Scheduling Hell and Achieve Labor Management Salvation

Introduction

3

How to Escape the 9 Circles of Restaurant Employee Scheduling Hell and Achieve Labor Management Salvation

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Tracking Constant Schedule Changes

Circle 1:

Scheduling and swift swaps

Overtime alerts

Shift transaction approvals

Employee information and skill levels

Time-off requests and availability

Anyone who has managed a restaurant knows the dread of finishing a schedule, posting it, and immediately getting hammered with requests for changes. Granted, there will always be schedule changes regardless of your scheduling method. But without the right tool to track all of the necessary information — shift swaps, time-off requests, hours worked, etc. — mistakes start to happen and patience wears thin. It can drain even the best restaurant manager. You. Are. Just. Never. Done!

The Path to Labor Management Salvation: Employee Scheduling Software

The right online employee scheduling solution will help your managers avoid information overload by tracking the inevitable schedule changes in one central location. Make life easier for your managers with a tool that tracks and helps automate:

How to Escape the 9 Circles of Restaurant Employee Scheduling Hell and Achieve Labor Management Salvation

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Poor Team Communication

Circle 2:

Broadcast messages

Deploy how-to videos

Keep store logs

Send out surveys

In a restaurant, poor communication between team members and managers is a breeding ground for potential problems — missed shifts, decreased accountability, and poor customer experience, just to name a few. A blur of sticky notes, text messages, phone calls, emails, and drive-bys isn’t communication. It’s chaos. And that just won’t cut it in the restaurant business.

The Path to Labor Management Salvation: In-App Messaging FunctionalityYou can overcome chaotic communications by organizing all of your channels into one a scheduling solution. This way, your team can access messages, schedules and other pertinent information all in the same place. You can give your managers the ability to:

How to Escape the 9 Circles of Restaurant Employee Scheduling Hell and Achieve Labor Management Salvation

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Juggling Labor Compliance

Circle 3:

Configure labor rules by geography and compliance requirements

Automate the scheduling of meals, breaks and minor labor

Catch scheduling mistakes before posting with built-in alerts

Configure minimum wage rates for each local store

The complex landscape of restaurant labor compliance can seem like a Hell all its own. The list of rules to follow for a single-unit operator is long enough, let alone the various state requirements that a larger brand has to meet. And as labor compliance grows in complexity, so does the risk of financial penalties. Failure to follow one or the full range of labor laws can result in expensive fines, damaged reputations, and, in the most extreme cases, lawsuits.

The Path to Labor Management Salvation: Conf igurable Labor RulesAs a restaurant operator, you need tools that offer the flexibility to configure labor rules according to your business’ geography and compliance needs. You can’t afford to take a $1,000 hit for a wage or schedule violation, so why not implement a tool that will help you avoid such a case? Allow your managers to:

How to Escape the 9 Circles of Restaurant Employee Scheduling Hell and Achieve Labor Management Salvation

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Time Theft & Payroll Pains

Circle 4:

Enforce clock-ins

Keep payroll compliant with special pay calculations for meals, breaks and predictive scheduling

Add mobile clock-in with geo-fencing cost controls

Receive mobile alerts for overtime, missed clock-ins and more

Time theft is one of the many ways that your staff can either knowingly or unwittingly steal from your restaurant. Fifteen minutes here, ten minutes there… It might not seem like a big deal to your team members, but every minute costs your business money.

The Path to Labor Management Salvation: An Integrated Time & Attendance SolutionYou can go a long way towards reducing time theft by integrating your labor management solution with a time and attendance tool. Look for one that lets your managers:

A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute found that time theft violations for minimum wage workers average $15 billion a year. Yes, that’s billion with a “b.”

How to Escape the 9 Circles of Restaurant Employee Scheduling Hell and Achieve Labor Management Salvation

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Erratic Staff ing Levels

Circle 5:

Labor cost is the most volatile line item in a restaurant budget, making up roughly 30% of that budget. Inefficient or outdated employee scheduling practices can drive that cost up even higher, which is a treacherous place to be in an industry with margins this slim.

Don’t suffer the financial strains of scheduling more employees than you need for a given shift.

The Path to Labor Management Salvation: More Accurate Planning with Forecasting TechnologyYou might not believe it, but it’s possible to take some of the guesswork out of scheduling — and the larger labor-management equation! Look for solutions that help automate the forecasting process, so managers can be confident that they’re scheduling the right number of employees in the right places at the right times. Look for solutions that provide the following capabilities:

Unnecessary labor spend simply isn’t an option in the current market — research shows that labor costs are expected to rise 50-100% in the next five to seven years.

Build schedules based on sales or guest volume data

Take into account variables like weather, events, and marketing initiatives

Reporting to show whether your stores performed according to plan

How to Escape the 9 Circles of Restaurant Employee Scheduling Hell and Achieve Labor Management Salvation

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Low Employee Engagement

Circle 6:

Employees don’t take kindly to erratic scheduling practices, either. If you make it hard for your workers to plan their lives outside of work, it’s going to affect their engagement and performance on the job.

According to Gallup polling data, 53% of workers reported that they are “not engaged” at their current jobs, and another 13% are “actively disengaged.”

Why does engagement matter? Simply put — employees who are focused and engaged in their work do a better job and provide a better customer experience. “Actively disengaged” employees — workers who are miserable at their jobs — can affect those around them and hamper productivity. Worse, they could demonstrate that misery to a customer.

34%Engaged

I love my job! I hate my job!I can’t wait to get a real job!

53%Not-Engaged

13% Actively

Disengaged

How to Escape the 9 Circles of Restaurant Employee Scheduling Hell and Achieve Labor Management Salvation

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Circle 6: Low Employee Engagement

The Path to Labor Management Salvation: Empower Employees with Mobile Scheduling ToolsGallup defines “engaged” workers as those employees who are involved, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace. And the benefits of a high-engagement culture speak for themselves:

One of the key ways to lay the groundwork for a culture of engagement is to solicit feedback from your workers to develop a baseline on where engagement currently stands. Another method is to empower employees with the resources they need to their jobs well. Scheduling software with messaging capabilities allows you to do both at once! With the right solution, managers can:

Businesses in the top quartile of engagement realize substantially better customer engagement, higher productivity, better retention, fewer accidents, and 21% higher profitability.

— Gallup

Standard time-off and availability procedures

Get the word out to five or 500 employees, all at once

Share company-wide goals and initiatives, as well as recognize and congratulate model stores, managers and employees

Keep a finger on the pulse of every shift

How to Escape the 9 Circles of Restaurant Employee Scheduling Hell and Achieve Labor Management Salvation

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Increased Employee Turnover

Circle 7:

If allowed to go unchecked, employee disengagement and dissatisfaction can fester and create turmoil within your organization — and that causes your employees to leave. Restaurant research firm TDn2K estimates that the cost of turnover per hourly worker comes out to more than $2,000.

Restaurant employee turnover has always been high — this is an industry that churns — but in an increasingly tight labor market, it doesn’t take much for an employee to walk out your door and right over to your competitor. Odds are, they have a “Now Hiring” sign up as well.

38%FSR

Management Turnover

– TDn2k

101%FSR

Employee Turnover

– TDn2k

54% LSR

Management Turnover

– TDn2k

140% LSR

Employee Turnover

– TDn2k

Turnover Crisis Cost of turnover per hourly worker = $2003

How to Escape the 9 Circles of Restaurant Employee Scheduling Hell and Achieve Labor Management Salvation

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Circle 7: Increased Employee Turnover

The Path to Labor Management Salvation: Give Managers the Tools they Need to SucceedEmployers can implement labor management solutions that make it easier and more cost effective to schedule their workers and communicate with them in one location. Such tools will allow your teams to achieve the work/life balance they crave.

A recent study by Adobe found that 70% of employees believe that technology improves their work-life balance. Additionally, 42% of millennials say they would leave a company due to “substandard” technology. With an online mobile scheduling solution, you can:

Engage employees from their first day on the job

Automate tedious processes for your managers

Establish your brand as an employer of choice to attract and retain talent

70% of employees believe that technology improves their work-life balance

42% of millennials say they would leave a company due to “substandard” technology

How to Escape the 9 Circles of Restaurant Employee Scheduling Hell and Achieve Labor Management Salvation

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Lack of Visibility into KPIs & Insights

Circle 8:

Restaurant managers also need visibility into the business’s most important metrics. Without that visibility, it’s possible to overspend on labor, to increase employee turnover, and to anger above-store leadership. How can you expect managers to achieve success in a purgatory where they don’t have the right data to know whether they’re effective?

The Path to Labor-Management Salvation: Arm your in-store managers with the planning tools they need to make them successful. Modern, mobile labor management technology with easy-to-read KPI dashboard features can present your managers with vital information they need to hone operations:

Hourly data updates so managers know where they stand with their forecast and schedules

Actionable Insights that leverage two or more data sources to identify trends that require action, such as forecast variances, and more

Easily share reports with automated email delivery and export options resulting in maximum visibility across the organization

How to Escape the 9 Circles of Restaurant Employee Scheduling Hell and Achieve Labor Management Salvation

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Dissatisfied Customers — and Lower Prof its

Circle 9:

The deepest, darkest circle of Hell in any restaurant business is dissatisfied customers. And a poor labor management process is a surefire way to unhappy guests. If guests are waiting too long for service or waiting too long for their meals, there’s a good chance they won’t return to your establishment. Consumer demands are changing, and if your team can’t keep up to meet them, you’re going to lose business.

The Path to Labor Management Salvation: Tools to Increase Employee Productivity A great guest experience demands great service, and great service stems from the productivity of your workers. Now, employee productivity can be a tricky thing, but providing your team members with tools that enable communication, save managers time and streamline operations can play a large role in increasing sales and improving the bottom line.

Hospitality technology reports that 40% of restaurant operators named employee productivity as their top reason for increased technology investment. Your managers need a labor-management solution that can:

Parse out the number of hours each task takes

Communicate with employees clearly and efficiently

Generate actionable reports quickly

Accurately forecast staffing needs down to the hour

How to Escape the 9 Circles of Restaurant Employee Scheduling Hell and Achieve Labor Management Salvation

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The Key to Labor Management SalvationIf your restaurant is currently suffering in one of these 9 Nine Circles of Scheduling Hell, you can probably find salvation with a labor management solution that fits your needs. Spare your managers from the suffering with an integrated, mobile employee scheduling software that helps automate and centralize:

Your team members will spend their time delivering exceptional service, learning new job skills, and helping to improve your business. Your managers will be free to engage with guests, coach employees, and catch any fires before they burn out of control. It all leads to a higher quality of service for your guests every day — and higher profits for you.

Can we get a hallelujah?

Call us at +1.877.539.5156 Visit HotSchedules.com

©2019 HotSchedules. All rights reserved. Reproduction in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of HotSchedules is strictly forbidden. HotSchedules cannot be responsible for errors in typography or photography. The materials and information included in this eBook are provided for reference purposes only. They are not intended either as a substitute for professional advice or judgment or to provide legal or other advice with respect to particular circumstances.

Building schedules

Employee communications

Time and attendance

Forecasting and reporting

HotSchedules can show you the way to Labor Management Salvation.

Want to learn more? Contact us today!

©2020 HotSchedules, Now Powered by Fourth All rights reserved. Reproduction in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of HotSchedules, Now Powered by Fourth is strictly forbidden. HotSchedules cannot be responsible for errors in typography or photography.

Call us at +1.877.539.5156 Visit Fourth.com